As sure as the sun rises and sets, so a new version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser emerges every four weeks.
And lo, Firefox 104 is ready for release.
Before we look at what’s new, a quick word to those of you hoping to hear that Firefox’s new Linux touchpad gestures are enabled out-of-the-box: they’re now. But, as in Firefox 103, you can enable the Wayland-compatible feature yourself via the about:config section. Usual caveats apply.
On to what is included in Firefox 104…
If there’s a “headline” change to be found in this release it’s that performance of the main Firefox UI itself is now “throttled” when the browser is minimised or obscured, in much the same way background tabs are. This, Mozilla devs say, should help to improve battery usage of the browser when running on laptops and similar.
Mozilla say Firefox 104 supports subtitles for content from Disney+ when played in Picture-in-Picture mode. As I don’t subscribe to Disney+ (though the reviews for Prey do have me tempted) I can’t capture a screenshot of this in action, but hey: I trust it’s there!
Subtitles are said to be available in PIP mode if watching video served through video.js. This online video player is popular with many online publications including tech-culture site Mashable.
Firefox 104 intros support the scroll-snap-stop (which will please many web-devs); and Mozilla say the browser’s built-in profiler tool is now able to analyse power usage of a given website …But only on Apple M1 and Windows 11 systems — grr!
Linux-specific fixes include a band-aid for an issue where the entire screen would apparently freeze when moving tabs to another window; balm for an errant (and seemingly unreproducible) bug where typing in a Google doc was delayed; and succor for unexpected ‘shimmering’ during a couple of specific CSS transforms.
Plus, as always, there are hundreds more bug fixes, performance improvements, and security patches included. There are, as ever, also telemetry tweaks so that Mozilla devs can learn more about how we all use their browser.
Firefox 104 is free, open source software. Windows and macOS users already using the browser will get the latest version as an over-the-air update in the coming days. Linux distro maintainers will also package the build and push it out via their go-to medium shortly.